Where We Sometimes Go Astray
by Pendancy
Summary: 2014. Croatoan is go. Castiel? Not so much.


All things happen because Dean Winchester wills them so.

Mutiny and blasphemy, betrayal and the death of Castiel's brothers at the edge of a long-ago engraved blade, the heavens falling to the Earth in streaks of orange and white—and Castiel cannot help but wonder what Dean would do with the information if he were to become aware he possessed such power.

He'd seen it in the depths of Hell: a black-eyed thing too far-gone to remember his own name, drunk on power to where it bled from unetheral pores, snarling and taunting and _challenging_.

Dean would say he isn't the type to let power go to his head. Castiel would be more than inclined to call him a liar.

But that feels like millennia ago.

Old memories better left untouched.

The role that Dean plays now also holds him in a great position of power: one that puts upon him the title of Savior and Protector, and Yeshu was never so lucky to have a fallen angel at his heels. Yeshu also never suffered the disposition of an incurable virus threatening to consume his followers.

2014.

**CROATOAN**

It's on the tongue of every child, only to be silenced by superstitious fingers pressed to lips. It runs in an unspoken current beneath the ground they sleep on; it hints at the edges of metallic-flavored water and threatens in the eyes of every man weary from a day's manual labor. It forces angel and human alike to bond together, setting up walls around communities that crumble within weeks. It makes thieves out of pastors and murderers out of otherwise good men. It is Sin embodied, and the wire fence around their own not-quite-crumbled community is tightening with each passing day.

Dean doesn't care much for the Sin reference. So Castiel stopped suggesting it the third time he received a sharp glance and a dismissive wave of Dean's hand. Religious mumbo-jumbo. Hardly applies to someone that Heaven has, so far as Castiel understands, completely shut out. Past and future, and his present is filled with the acrid smoke of human bodies casting their last light on this earth from a funeral pyre.

_Sin_, Castiel could hear him say, _is sitting around and doing jack while that fucking __**thing **__wears my brother for a suit._

Sam Winchester is long dead. That _thing_ is Castiel's brother.

Sometimes, Castiel wonders if Dean realizes that at all.

Dean has the Colt. The gun once fated to "kill anything," the thing that ripped Azazel's budding kingdom asunder, the thing that Dean has hunted for over the better part of five years. The Colt cannot kill Lucifer. Castiel knows this. Dean knows this.

And galaxies away, a man attempts to draw water from sand once the oceans have dried.

Hope is a funny thing. As is guilt.

The barrel glints in the dim lamplight and there is a fallen angel resting against a headboard waiting for the ceiling to stop spinning.

"I need you together by midnight."

"I know," he says for the fourth time, but Dean doesn't seem to be budging. _By midnight_ is Dean's way of telling him to get off of his ass _now_, and there is a fine line between explaining the duration of opiates and Absinthe to a stubborn man and ending up thrown into the back of a jeep with a gun thrust in his hand and the weight of responsibility on his back.

"Dean." A slurred sound forced through chapped lips, and the bare mattress rubs against Castiel's back as he slides down enough to relieve his neck of that terrible angle.

"What."

_Click_.

Didn't they use the last of those bullets years ago?

It takes all of Castiel's waking strength to gesture towards one of his boarded up windows. "They know we aren't coming back."

"We're coming back."

"You are."

"_We_ are."

"You think I'd leave you?"

"Yes." And the look Castiel receives in return is well worth the seed of doubt and bitterness that has been planted since Dean dragged him on his first ride-along. A pained guard rising over green eyes, but that isn't protest that Castiel sees there. It's guilt. Again. Always.

"You're high."

Still no protest.

"Give it a day, Dean," he mutters, and his eyes are already falling shut. Midnight is still far enough away.

The crash, Cas is sure, is nothing more than Dean's fist hitting a table and the subsequent damage that occurs whenever Dean Winchester is told he can't have his way. "I'm not giving it _shit_. He knows we're here, Cas. He fucking _knows_ and he hasn't walked in yet. Why? Why the fuck do you think that is?"

"You're predictable."

Because Dean Winchester will walk out into the open and scream profanities at the devil with a broken gun and pride too vast for his position. Because Lucifer wears Sam and _that_, alone, is enough to draw out the elder brother. Because Lucifer knows that Castiel is useless, and Dean is stubborn, and John Winchester gave the Colt a bit too much credit.

In the end, what can Castiel do but follow? Always the watcher, even when his lack of power prevents him from playing the role of protector.

"Midnight."

The drugs are too thick in his blood to allow Castiel to jump when the door slams hard enough to tremble the walls, but his mind is clear enough to remember a younger, smarter Dean who would have weighed every available option before diving head-first into his own grave.

Wisdom does not always come with time, he guesses.

"I know."


End file.
